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Books by Askia M. Touré
From the Pyramids to the Projects: Poems of Genocide and
Resistance! /
Dawnsong:The Epic Memory of Askia
Toure
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Rudy
Interviews Askia Touré
On Dawnsong!
And the Black Arts Movement
Part 2
Rudy: In the poem “Eye of
Ra/1,” I was pleasantly amused by the line “Osiris-I,/a
Paul Robeson,/ a Muhammad Ali,/ . . . /plumed stallions dancing
upon/Eurasian skulls?” You invoke the Egyptian god Osiris, his
manifestation in contemporary heroes.
In
Dawnsong! you also emphatically
point out a clash of civilizations – that which is African
versus that which is Eurasian. This poem thus seems to mirror
the “poetic equivalent” of the view of Cheikh Anta Diop and
others of that historical tradition which theorizes Egypt
(Africa) as a millennial victim.
Can we truthfully say that ancient Egypt was
more a victim than a millennial oppressor? You recall, our folks
sang, “Tell Old Faro Let My People Go.”
Askia: Rudy, have you thoroughly read
Diop’s The African Origins of Civilization, Myth or
Reality, or his equally seminal The Cultural Unity
of Black Africa? If so, you’d realize that he
was outlining, in detail, what specifically was the
Cushite, or African, vision and ancient societal model. Also,
one would think that you’d approve of this act of historical restoration/self-determination:
anti-colonialist African scholars seeking to, as Dr. Asa
Hilliard says, “Return to the Source”—the World’s
seminal Civilization which parented not only Mediterranean
(“Western”) civilization, but also “Middle Eastern”
civilization.
And I find it “pleasantly amusing” that
you seem to overlook the modern, imperialist doctrine of World
White Supremacy, which provided the rationale for the Maafa, or
African Holocaust, which destroyed Medieval African Civilization
(Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Ife, Benin, etc.), and as many as sixty
to one hundred million Africans, via chattel slavery and
colonialism.
And as for “Go Down, Moses,” please
don’t utilize our battered, raped slave ancestors who were
only exposed by their masters to Jewish folklore and patriarchal
religious myth to pacify them (which failed by the way:
only remember the slave-prophet your website is named after. He
certainly didn’t “turn the other cheek” to oppressors!).
As for the Kamites (Egyptians), I’m not
saying they were perfect. They were human beings who developed
the first Civilization, and were leading the Ancient World.
But, as Dr. John H. Clarke has taught, the 19th
Century Germans and Anglo-Saxons not only colonized
Africa, Asia, and the dark Human Majority, but they
colonized Knowledge: they re-wrote History, falsified it
and Europeanized it.
They literally wrote the ancient Africans out
of history, portraying them as “eternal savages,”
“inferior" "heathens," who made no
contributions to human culture—which seems to have deeply
influenced your outlook on Africans.
In fact, one of the reasons Sonia, Amiri, Dr.
Nathan Hare and I, among others, pioneered Africana Studies at
San Francisco State Univ. was the backwards, self-hatred
displayed by Blacks who were ignorant about their ancestors. As
Brother Malcolm X said: “Who stole your history and made
you despise yourself?"
Rudy: After reading your poems in
Adoff’s anthology and in
Dawnsong! I’m
convinced that the “rap” in your poems, back then in the BAM
days, have had an influence on me, maybe subconsciously in a
circuitous manner. I
wrote a poem about twenty years ago titled “Rahsaan
Dead at Forty-One,” a praise poem for Roland Kirk on
experiencing him doing “Volunteer Slavery” at the Famous
Ballroom in Baltimore.
I like Roland’s style, his sound, his
persona. I tried to represent his spirit on the page.
For me it was play, recreating that joy I saw him
carrying on stage.
If Dawnsong! is anything it is
a book of praise poems, a book of invocations, as if you are
trying to bring into life a civilization and its mysteries, long
dead, that existed in the past, thousands and thousands of years
ago. In her Introduction, Professor Joyce wrote that you have
developed a coherent system of symbols that bring together a
viable world, like we see in the Hobbit.
Was Dawnsong! a bit of play for
you, as we see in “O Lord of the Light,” a poem in
which you invoke the musician-composer Sun Ra
and his stage
antics? Or is there more?
Askia: What Dr. Joyce said was:
“Taking Larry Neal’s resurrection of the Orisha in
blues to its ultimate development, Touré replaces Neal’s
[allusions] to Black folk culture with allusions to Egyptian
history and mythology. Consequently Touré expands and extends
the Black Aesthetic paradigm, taking it to its natural
conclusion as he develops an Afrocentric paradigm reflective
of the intellectual progression of the Black Aesthetic from the
1960s to the 1990s.” [my emphasis]
“Additionally [she cites certain key poems]
illuminate a cohesiveness in his art. This cohesiveness grounds
him in the artistic principles of the Black Arts Movement and
provides him with a revolutionary aesthetic with its
foundations in Africa and the East. By using Egyptian gods,
goddesses, and ancient history as the framework for his poetic
vision, Touré has magnanimously brought a
systematically new iconography to African-American poetry.” [
my emphasis]
And, Rudy, her references in comparing my
work were the African epic, the “Ozidi Saga,” and the
“Western epics of Homer [the Iliad and the Odyssey] and Virgil
[the Aenead],” which were actual
ancient wars with “god-like” heroes, and not Tolkein’s
Hobbit fantasies. Remember Heinrich Schliemann actually
dug up the ruins of Troy.
As for the late Master Sun Ra, while
he sometimes engaged in “cosmic humor,” and was playful;
however, his preservation of the big band/swing structures, and
linking them beyond westernized “nightclub jazz” to a Cosmic
Vision was dead serious: like, for instance, the koans
(riddles) of Japanese Zen masters, who ask, “what is the sound
of one hand clapping”? which can’t be solved with only the
rational/logical mind.
Oh, I don’t know, Bro., when thoroughly
studying “O Lord of Light!” an epic of Jazz history coupled
with Sun Ra’s Osirian Drama, could there really be more?
Rudy: Do
you believe that African paganism, primarily ancestor worship
and magic (defying time and the laws of science), has some
liberation value in our 21st hi-tech society? In his White
Man, Listen! Richard Wright argued that this African
“trait” would be the death of Africans. I think Wright went
too far. From afar it seems however that African tribal cultures
generate conflict, war, genocide, famine. The worse evils ever
come into being. Mostly, Africans are now either Muslims or
Christians, trying to put that tribal history behind them.
Is there something wrong with that?
Of course, African is now more than Bantu?
Don’t we all now have to create a more open-ended identity
than one based on old concepts of race and nation?
Askia: As to your sinister “African
paganism, primarily ancestor worship and magic (defying time and
the laws of science),” you’re kidding me, right? Do you
really champion such a backwards position? I feel as though
I’m being severely questioned by a jury composed of Cecil
Rhodes, Rudyard Kipling, King Leopold of Belgium, and Christian
Missionary, David Livingston!
As I said before, I severely disagree with
your assumptions. No people can ever rise in the World
who’re ignorant of, and have a deep contempt for their
ancestors . . . . Looking in the face of the Great Sphinx,
the Pyramids of Giza, the grand temples of Karnak and Luxor (the
world’s largest temples), part of the Seven Wonders of the
World, how can you state that Ancient, Classical African
Civilization (Egypt and Nubia) and subsequent cultures had not
developed science?
No medicine, mathematics, geometry,
trigonometry, architecture, engineering, astronomy, etc.? So
then, Thales, Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, etc. were deluded
and wasting their time by studying under these African
priest-scholars and sages?
And Homer and Herodotus were equally
“foolish” when they praised the “god-like Ethiopians, the
oldest and most perfect of men”?
I don’t know, bro., but if the famous Greek
philosophers, scientists, historians and sages spoke this way
about my ancestors, I’d at least have a basic curiosity to
investigate them . . . As for the racist, Eurocentric propaganda
about “African tribal cultures generating conflict, war,
genocide, famine,” that is so pro-Western, pro-Imperialist an
outlook, that I’m not going to dignify it by responding.
Haven’t you read Rodney’s How Europe
Under-developed Africa? Fanon’s The Wretched of the
Earth, or Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons, or
Cabral’s Revolution in Guinea?
Finally, that you, an African-American, part
of a People who lived under official U.S. Apartheid (Jim Crow
Segregation) until 1965, can recite such opinions astounds me!
Is this racist-imperialist Society which just (crookedly)
“re-selected” the neo-fascist George W. Bush, a more
“open-minded” Society? Aren’t you blaming the victims of
Harold Cruse’s and Harry Haywood’s “Domestic
Colonialism,” and the bards of the African-American Intifada?
Rudy: Rightfully, “Nefertari: A
Praise Song” is the most beautiful and the most lovely,
sensuous poem in Dawnsong! You have in this
idealized landscape an idealized black woman, the most perfect
of all female perfections. Do you think such beauty is singular
or is it democratic and egalitarian?
Askia: Aesthetics. What do the
political terms “democratic” and “egalitarian” have to
do with the aesthetics of female (or male) beauty; aesthetics
which embody the standards of a “race” or nationality? I
take it also that you’re somewhat unfamiliar with symbolist
poetry, which can be rather “tricky” for literal,
non-metaphorical thinkers.
On the basic, human level, I believe that the
African woman is beautiful in her own right, without
comparison to anyone else; and, further, she is the original (being
the First Woman, in all of its implications) human beauty
archetype. So that’s what the poem’s about: archetypes and
mythic symbols of primal feminine beauty.
Rudy: I recall Baraka saying that you
were a singer of words and I’ve heard you singing. They say
jazz music is an aural music even when notes are read. In any
event I just know that which I like about jazz or jazz music. I
like Leon Thomas and “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” I like
Miles “Sketches of Spain.” Or Satchmo’s phrasing. Or
Robert Johnson’s “Hellhounds on My Trail.”
I also like your singing in “Osirian
Rhapsody: A Myth.”
In this poem are the curious lines,
“infernos of the spirit,/exterminating/angels of the mind.”
Should one read this as meaning that religion, truth, true
devotion should move the believer, that is, thinking gets
one in trouble? You know for us Baptists and Methodists that’s
a very convincing kind of argument about worship style.
Askia: In “Osirian
Rhapsody: A Myth,” in condensed language, the poet is asking
one to actually observe the horrendous Twentieth Century, with
its racism, colonialism, global war, and various holocausts in
Europe, Africa, Asia; its nuclear disasters endangering
Humanity, as perhaps the scariest time in human history since
the Ice Age.
And, further, the great Black Musicians were
“priest-philosophers” (as I noted in my theoretical Liberator
essays) who “chanted litanies of Rebirth”—via Jazz/Cosmic
innovation—which opened the total Human Being to healing,
unity and “spiritual” Rebirth. (I recently finished “Miles
and Me” by my brother, Quincy Troupe. In the epilogue, he made
the same point about the effects of Miles’ music upon
humanity.) How this relates to non-thinking, I haven’t the
faintest idea.
(I’d surmise that healing might, in fact,
encourage clarity of thought.) However, over the years, I’ve
noticed plenty of “Baptists and Methodists” at the great
Jazz and Reggae festivals, in Quincy’s words, “shaking their
booties” to the healing, liberating music—our Modern gift
to humanity.
Rudy: Du Bois
, 30s social activists,
and Mao concluded that there was no such thing as art for
art’s sake. Maybe that’s an absurdity as Jacques Maritain
argues. The artist is never absolved from moral responsibility
to God and man. For love is never in vain.
At his talk at Yenan in 1942, Mao said,
“All our literature and art are for the masses of the
people,” speaking of peasants and workers. One wonders how
such uniformity in art is
possible among a people so numerous so diverse as the Chinese,
varying traditions, and memories even though they all speak
Chinese.
Is there a middle road here in this
philosophy of art? I
suppose all art, as Maritain
points out, urges and evokes in us
“intuitive experience, revelation, and beauty”— like when
you use the phrase “prophet of/galactic metaphor.” How
fitting! Or fantastic in the instance when you say,
“syncopation/released from Pyramids/of monumental/Joy.”
Askia: As for the social
responsibilities of artists, Du Bois
, Chairman Mao, etc.,
generally, I agree with the tenor and tone of your musing here.
Actually as a symbolist poet, I believe that the human mind
works on many levels, and Art at its grandest, like music, works
upon those multiple levels.
My utilizing of imagery, symbolism, myth and
metaphor toward the resurrecting of our lost archetypes, is a
restoration of the grand spirituality, the depth language of
poetry, as the World’s peoples knew it—from the Ancient
World through the 19th Century, before Eliot, Auden
and the New Critics “dumbed it down,” and focused solely
upon the sordid, the morbid, and the purely
“rational/logical” mind; banishing the Imagination and the
Beautiful from human memory.
That is why I admired Allen Ginsberg’s
work, and his resurrection of William Blake, Shelley, and along
with Gary Snyder, their embracing of the ancient poetry of
India, China, and Japan. They were, to my mind, attempting to
poetry out of the mundane strait-jacket of the square, Anglo
“New Critics.” I followed their work, along with that of the
brilliant LeRoi Jones, when I was in the Air Force of the late
‘50s. . . . Since then, in my searches for an African-American
epic/communal Voice, I followed the translated work of Pablo
Neruda and his celebrated “Canto General,” as well as his
powerful “Spain in my Heart,” and his subsequent political
poetry.
If one has read the “Canto General,” and
Neruda’s other books, one can see his influence in Dawnsong!
(as critic James Smethurst alluded to). And, finally, all true
poets, in my opinion, write for humanity: which is something
Pablo Neruda, Cuba’s Nicholas Guillen, and Cheikh Anta Diop, who
were all Marxists, realized.
Rudy: Clearly, Dawnsong!
is Pan-Africanist in its orientation. You evoke the
cultures of East Africa, West Africa, Central Africa, Brazil,
and USA. “Aboriginal Elegy” is such a poem. It
surprises. It’s more romantic than classical antiquity.
An elegy for a woman? Though you find the
ancient black female essence in Nefertari, Cicely Tyson, and
Gladys Knight, you end the poem as a lovesick lover, with the
lines “while Aryan rape/his darling Khemi:/Her indigo
glory/lost to him/forever.” Why such tears?
Askia: Rudy, I ask that you
familiarize yourself more with symbolist poetry: be careful
about taking things “too literally.” And be careful that you
don’t expose yourself to serious criticism from Womanist
critics as being insensitive to rape. If you’ll notice,
I constantly use “we” and “us”—the Communal
Voice—throughout “Aboriginal Elegy.”
And the final stanza, "we contemplate
your classic/beauty, like Tarharqa" (check out the
simile) "gazing with streaming eyes/ from far Napata,/
while Aryans rape/his darling Khemi: her indigo glory/lost to
him/Forever!"
The poem is not only speaking of the Aryan
(Assyrian) rape of “Khemi,” feminized form of Ancient
Kemetic archetype, but on the basic level, the rape of the black
woman by barbarians! And the defeated pharaoh, Tarharqa (black
man) feeling helpless to prevent it.
It seems the question is: why doesn’t
something like this rape move you to sadness,
outrage—or even
tears; especially because it, deliberately mirrors much
of the African-American male experience during chattel slavery,
and afterwards, in the Deep South?
Rudy: You are working on another book
of poems. Will it also deal with epic issues, like the life and
death of peoples, or will it be more personal?
Askia: One thing that both Neruda and
Aime Cesaire taught me, was that the political can also be
“personal”; that, like so many things, these are often
artificial barriers. My new collection deals with jingoistic
aspects of “patriotism,” and, hopefully, raises some very
basic questions about political hypocrisy. It also raises key
questions and issues about the Age we now live in. In this
period in Human social development, should one be more
“patriotic” to one’s individual “race”/Nation, or
to Humanity as a whole? Indeed, what defines
“patriotism” when our planet and all of its inhabitants and
species are threatened by a rampaging, destructive “Global”
imperialism?
Rudy: A final word on BAM, do you
think Amiri
Baraka the BAM poet with the most notoriety, caused
the dissolution of BAM by his tough ideological stance or
confusion, for instance, his calling fellow poets, “pork chop
nationalists”?
Askia: What is the root of this
seeming obsession with Amiri Baraka? Is this an unconscious
aspect of a Personality Cult? Do you realize that you’ve never
asked any questions about Larry Neal,
Sonia Sanchez, Hoyt
Fuller, Dr. Carolyn Fowler, Haki
Madhubuti, Sarah Fabio,
“Umbra,” Ishmael Reed, Tom Dent,
Lorenzo
Thomas, Calvin
Hernton, my mentor John
O.
Killens? Only Baraka, Baraka, Baraka?
As far as the “dissolution of BAM" was
concerned, whatever Amiri’s alleged problems, we can’t lay
the crushing of a Movement on one person. I would repeat that it
was U.S. Imperialism’s response to the revolutionary
BAM/BLM that caused Its “dissolution”: the attacks by the
FBI’s COINTELPRO on Black radical groups, coupled with the
“recession” and Drug Plagues in the Inner Cities, during the
Reagan era which crushed the Movement.
A Final Point: I don’t know where you get
your information, but the term “Porkchop Nationalist”
came from our defining certain Harlem street-speakers as
“pork-choppin’”— i.e.” hustling money” from crowds
after speaking. (One famous Street-griot was even named Eddie
“PorkChop” Davis.) The vicious, slanderous attempt to apply
that definition to the Black Power revolutionaries came from the
white “New Left”-backed Eldridge Cleaver! At no time did I
ever hear, or hear of, Amiri Baraka using that vicious term.
Only the white-applauded Eldridge Leroy Cleaver.
Peace, Out!
Source:
Dawnsong! The Epic Memory of Askia
Toure By Askia M. Touré. Introduction by Joyce A. Joyce.
Dawnsong!
won the 2003 "Stephen Henderson Poetry Award." – presented
by the African-American Literature and Culture Society of the American
Literature Association.
<<------Rudy Interview Askia Part
I
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* * Askia
Muhammad Touré in New York and at Sistas' Place:
From Monday, September 18th thru Sunday, September 23, 2007 Askia
Muhammad Touré will be in New York and Newark, celebrating the recent
publication of two collections of poetry: Mother Earth Responds:
Green Poems and Alternative Visions (Whirlwind Press), and
African Affirmations: Songs for Patriots (Africa World Press).
Right alongside Amiri Baraka, Larry
Neal, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, etc., Askia Muhammad
Touré is considered one of the principal architects of the 1960s Black
Arts/Black Aesthetic movements. A member of the legendary Umbra Group
and of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Touré has remained
an activist poet of conscience throughout his years. His other books
include Earth (1968), JuJu: Magic Songs for the Black Nation
(with playwright Ben Caldwell / 1970), Songhai! (1972), and
From the Pyramids to the Projects (1990), which won an American Book
Award. Widely published in Black Scholar, Soulbook,
Black Theatre, Black World, and Freedomways, his poems
and essays have embodied the ideology of a people seeking to reclaim
their images and history.
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posted 12/16/04 |
